Tesla says it will redesign doors after reports of children being trapped
Close-up of flush-mounted, retracting door handle on Tesla automobile, San Ramon, California, September 21, 2020. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
PIEDMONT, Calif. - Tesla said it will look into redesigning the way to open some of its car doors following a federal investigation into passengers, especially children, being trapped inside its vehicles.
Bloomberg first reported the news following its own investigation into the door issue, citing 140 occasions of people being trapped in their Teslas.
Tesla's announcement, although the company didn't give specifics, came one day after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched an inquiry into the company's electronic door handles becoming "inoperative."
NHTSA cited nine examples of Tesla's 2021 Model Y cars.
The most common complaint, the federal agency reported, was that parents could not get their children out of the back of the car, and they ended up breaking a window to get back in.
Although Tesla vehicles have manual door releases, NHTSA noted that children may not be able to reach or figure out how to open them.
Based on NHTSA's preliminary review, this condition appears to occur when the electronic door locks receive insufficient voltage from the vehicle.
A closer look at Tesla Cybertruck's design following death of 3 Piedmont students
Nearly a month after three college students died in a fiery Tesla Cybertruck crash in Piedmont, many questions still remain. We took a closer look at the car's design and talked to experts about the car's unique features.
Tesla design chief Franz von Holzhausen told Bloomberg’s Hot Pursuit! podcast on Wednesday that the company is looking to combine the manual and electronic release mechanisms in the doors, which are now separate, in order to make escaping the car easier and quicker in a "panic situation."
"The idea of combining the electronic one and the manual one together into one button, I think, makes a lot of sense," he said on the podcast. "That’s something that we’re working on."
While three deaths in Piedmont, California are not a formal part of the current federal investigation, there have been complaints about the electric doors opening up on a Tesla Cybertruck last November when three college students died when the driver crashed the vehicle, and it burned upon impact.
KTVU also took a closer look at the Cybertruck design, especially the issues with its electric doors and hard-to-break windows, exposing some of the same issues that the federal government is now investigating in the Model Y.
In a Cybertruck, the manual release for the door locks is a latch on the door in the front of the car by the window switches, and under a plastic well in the back "map pocket" of the car.
The parents of one of those students, 19-year-old Krysta Tsukahara, filed a lawsuit in April that states she was trapped inside the Cybertruck and burned to death. The suit, however, does not name Tesla as a defendant.
One of her friends, the fourth person in the Cybertruck, was pulled out to safety when a friend who had been following behind broke the vehicle's windows by hitting it up to 15 times with a five-foot long tree branch.